Electronic messaging systems have become an important means of communication within organizations and among individuals. Examples of electronic messaging systems include electronic mail systems, instant messaging systems, short-message-service (SMS) systems, text messaging systems, or the like. Though electronic messaging systems offer significant advantages over their paper-based counterparts, organizing the large number of electronic messages one receives throughout the day, week, month, or year remains a challenge.
Organizational experts have identified five general stages of personal document organization. These stages include collection, sorting, prioritization, action, and archive/deletion. Though one or more or all of the stages may be implemented differently from one user to another, each user typically engages in some incarnation of these five stages of document organization. The second stage called “sorting,” for example, can consume as much of 20% of a user's productive time during the day, thereby reducing overall user productivity.
Many users utilize messaging systems, e.g., electronic mail clients and/or systems, as time management tools. The electronic messaging system effectively becomes the primary repository for storing actionable work documents. These documents, at some point, must be sorted to support document retrieval so that users are able to locate documents and act upon the documents as intended.